AWS Well-Architected Review – Why Do You Need It?

Are you Well-Architected?

More often, than not, it’s hard to answer that question with a simple yes or no. Cloud implementation is complex, and it’s not easy to be confident about the decisions made by you/your team, or if they’ll stand the test of time. AWS has made this easier, by providing the awesome AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF). This framework provides a structured approach to compare your cloud environment against Amazon’s best practices, with pointers on how to improve over time.

If your organization is just getting started on AWS, the WAF helps kick-off the planning process to build a sturdy foundation for a scalable and flexible cloud infrastructure that meets technical and business needs. For businesses already on cloud, a complete WAF review can help gain critical feedback and measurement on their cloud journey.

AWS Well-Architected Review

Once you’ve started using the framework, an AWS Well-Architected Review encourages you to follow a consistent and structured approach. If you’re looking to rapidly benchmark applications, infrastructure, and cloud operations, the review enables you to architect, build, migrate, and optimize architectures that follow AWS best practices and guidelines.

Design Principles: For each pillar, there are design principles that must be considered and addressed while designing cloud-based implementations.

Questions: The review is driven by experts asking questions about your AWS services. Functional and non-functional topics are explored to better understand the current state of your workload’s architecture and implementation.

Remediation: Based on the analysis, you are provided recommendations with insights into what’s working and what’s not. These results are not a scorecard; they are a measurement. The framework will change over time, so it provides critical feedback on your current approach.

Remediation of items identified during the review help optimize your current workloads and cloud consumption costs. Need more reasons to do it? AWS is also sweetening the pot by providing billing credits for customers who execute a Well-Architected Review and begin the remediation process.

Why You Need A Well-Architected Review

Build and deploy faster: Reduce time spent on capacity management and use automation to experiment and realize value more often.

Lower or mitigate risks: Understand risks in your architecture and address them before they impact your business and distract your team.

Make informed decisions: Ensure you’ve made active architectural decisions that highlight the impact they might have on your business outcomes.

Learn AWS Best Practices: Make sure your teams are aware of best practices which are refined by reviewing thousands of customer architectures on AWS.

Initially, only AWS Solution Architects could conduct Well-Architected Reviews, however, this changed recently as AWS opened it up to a few select partners who can perform reviews. As launch partners for the Well-Architected Review Program, NetEnrich can perform comprehensive evaluations of your on-premise or AWS workloads to leverage the full potential of AWS Cloud.

To better understand how the AWS Well-Architected Framework can impact your business, watch the on-demand webinar by Taylor Gaffney from NetEnrich. Taylor reviews AWS best practices and explores open-ended questions to measure your architecture against the five pillars that make up the Well-Architected Framework, as well as the design principles within each of the pillars.